Helsinki Design Lab's roots stretch back to 1968. In 2008 Sitra resurrected the initiative and operated it for five years. We are now closing this chapter of the project's life, and in doing so creating a living archive. Our intention is to open up the work of HDL as a useful platform for others who carry forward the mission of institutional redesign.

The full website will remain in place until at least the beginning of 2015. You are free to copy, remix, and extend the content here using a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license. Below we've curated a shortlist of useful posts from this site's history.

Done. Is there more to be said? We're done with the big event, this team's first stab at hosting a gathering of 100+ people from all over the world. I'm very proud of our effort. Feedback from the participants thus far has been overwhelmingly positive. Go team!

This snapshot was taken a couple hours before HDL Global began, as Marco and I walked with the panel moderators to see the venue. It's an accurate description of the HDL team's mental acuity at the moment.

At 11am on a Monday morning the team is still looking a little tired. The previous week of hyperspeed organizing, preparing, futzing and fixing is now being paid back as all that expended energy echoes ahead of us while we ramp down, disintegrating focus at an equal but opposite rate as we applied it during the ramp up.

In coming days we'll be posting follow ups from our four guest bloggers as well as more images and thoughts from the event. For now, our sincere thanks to: Emil+Stephanie for making the finest of event materials; XOXCO for their excellent help on the dossier and liveblog aspects of this site; Ivo Corda and Pekka Mustonen for fantastic photography; Sanna and her team at Management Events for their able handling of everything behind the scenes; the 100+ people who came from far and wide to be part of our event; and to you, dear reader, for following along at home. See you in Week 078!

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What is HDL?

Helsinki Design Lab uses strategic design to uncover the "architecture" of large-scale challenges and develop more holistic, complete solutions for improvement. We strive to advance knowledge, capability, and achievement in this discipline, regardless of geography or nationality. HDL most recently operated 2009-2013 and is now closed.